What Causes Emotions?

For centuries, science has asked "What causes emotions?" The answer is revealed, when you view your mind as a pattern recognition network. Special organs within your limbic system recognize the patterns of events in your life and respond. Their signals trigger emotions, which instantly decide your attitudes and modify your behavior. Aroused emotions trigger restlessness, excitation, and agitation, preparing you for action.

Anger and fear are such emotions. Anger is blind to consequences and lashes out. Fear ignores successes and withdraws from confrontation. Despair envelops you in gloom, switching off pleasant avenues of thought. It is possible to still such negative emotions and be ruled by your common sense. Freed from fear, anger and despair, you can become calm and savor the positive emotions like joy and laughter. The Buddhists believe this state of mind to be one of the highest levels of consciousness.

Emotions
dominate your behavior, but are not your visceral or facial
responses.

Emotion
signals originate from the limbic system and provide a multitude of
competing controls added from early history.

Emotion
signals trigger bodily responses as well as feelings and sensations,
which make you experience cold fear or warm love.

Emotions
trigger sequences of motor responses, which act with focused
strategies for survival.

At
any point in time, a single family of emotions take control and act
ahead of your awareness. A massive inherited wisdom guides these
actions.

While
emotions have a blinkered access to memories, RI sees the whole and
is neutral.

The
nobler emotions are nature's greatest inventions. They motivate the
system to achieve excellence.

What
Causes Emotions? -They Rule Your BehaviorIf,
suddenly, you need to walk on a plank a hundred feet above ground,
your fear will kick in. That emotion will instantly suppress
even your elementary abilities. Fear will stiffen you into
immobility. Even slight movements will appear to be life threatening.
Instead of walking, you will desperately want to lie down and grip
the plank.

Within
the blink of an eye, you will have lost your normal capacity to walk
a few steps on a plank. Mysteriously, a single emotion will have
modified your entire behavior. Every expression on your face reflects
a specific family of emotions. Even blind and deaf children show
similar facial expressions. Human behaviors and facial expressions
are mirrored in the gentle caress of love, or the sharp scowl of
anger.

What
Causes Emotions? -The Mystery Initially,
scientists discarded emotions as being irrelevant to the rational
modern mind, a throwback from primitive times. It was Charles Darwin,
who first suggested that emotions have a real world existence,
visibly expressed in the behavior of humans and lower animals. He
suggested that the existence of an emotion could be derived from an
angry face, or even a bad feeling in the stomach. In those days,
science viewed emotions as essentially bodily and visceral
responses.

What
Causes Emotions? -Not Visceral ReactionsW.B.
Canon disproved the idea that emotions were visceral responses. He
showed that emotions did not follow artificial stimulation of
visceral responses. Emotional behavior was still present when the
viscera was surgically or accidentally isolated from the central
nervous system. So, emotions existed, but they were not the churning
in your gut, or the knot in your stomach.

What
Causes Emotions? -Neural Signals Trigger
EmotionsExcitation
of certain parts of the temporal lobe produce intense fear in
patients. When other neurons are stimulated, they feel dread.
Excitation of other nuclei cause feelings of isolation, loneliness or
sometimes of disgust. Electrical stimulation of the septal areas
produced a feeling of pleasure for rats. The animals would self
stimulate those regions, till they were exhausted, preferring the
effect of stimulation to normally pleasurable activities such as
consuming food. Emotions originate as distinctive patterns of nerve
impulses, which also trigger neurochemical events.

What
Causes Emotions? -They Have Primeval OriginsThe
Hydra was a primitive branched tubular animal. A net of neurons
between its outside and its internal digestive cavity responded to
any stimulus applied to any part of its body. That process enabled
the animal to vary its length, and use its tentacles to push food
particles into its mouth. Strong contractions expelled indigestible
material from the same orifice. The stimulus, triggered by the
recognition of touch, enabled those animals to approach, accept or
reject food and escape. Over millions of years, nerve cells learned
to recognize many more patterns, in addition to touch, to achieve
more sophisticated survival goals.

What
Causes Emotions? -Emotions Predict DangerThe
early reptilian “nosebrains,” decided to avoid, or consume food,
by analyzing smells. Fear was another early control system, triggered
by the amygdala, an almond sized organ in the limbic system. It
stores memories of unpleasant experiences and triggers fear, when it
detects the possibility of a repetition of such experiences.
Experiments show that just an awareness of the possibility of a
painful electric shock activates nerve impulses from the amygdala for
rats.

What
Causes Emotions? -The Insula And Feeling LinksYour
body has systems, which recognize a range of feelings, including
sharp pain, burning pain, cool or warm temperature, itching, muscle
contraction, muscle burn because of lactic acid, joint movements,
soft touch, mechanical stress, tickling, flushing, hunger and thirst.
These bodily sensations trigger impulses to the insula in the limbic
system. This organ is also activated by social emotions - love and
hate, lust and disgust. Thus, you experience a variety of feelings
along with your emotions. Our literature describes those
emotion/feeling combinations as cold calculation, hot temper, or warm
love.

What
Causes Emotions? -Emotions Direct Strategic DrivesCompeting
emotions are continually generated beneath your awareness. Each
emotion initiates within your subconscious mind a drive,
with a remembered strategy - an inherited or acquired way of coping
with problems in life. Anger generates a drive, which navigates
aggressively. Fear triggers a defensive strategy. Laughter achieves
relaxation of the stresses of life. Jealousy makes the system attack
competitors. Love makes it caring and protective. Each emotion
focuses the system to take actions, which follow its strategy, These
emotions compete with each other for the control of your mind.

What
Causes Emotions? -A Single Family of Emotions RulesYour
moods shift because an intuitive
decision making process,
within your limbic system swiftly and continually switches control
from one group of emotions to another. At any point in time, a single
family of emotions rules, actively inhibiting conflicting objectives.
Love subdues the onset of anger. These emotions micromanage the
fluidity of your muscle movements, your facial expressions and the
choice and tone of your words. They exercise subtle and relentless
controls over the intensity and nuance of your every gesture and
spoken word. The ruling emotion also controls the access of the whole
system to its memories.

What
Causes Emotions? -Act First, Inform LaterThe
famous experiments of Benjamin Libet showed that your awareness
follows a system decision. He studied subjects who voluntarily
pressed a button, while noting the position of a dot on a computer
screen, which shifted its position every 43 milliseconds. The exact
moment of conscious awareness was the noted moment of depressing the
button. Each time, Libet had also timed the beginning of motor neuron
activity in the brains of his subjects. Libet discovered that
awareness occurred 350 milliseconds AFTER the beginning of motor
activity. The system always acts and then informs you. When angry,
you will act in anger, before you become aware of your action.

What
Causes Emotions? -Massive Inner WisdomThe
DNA codes in your body contain codes, which instruct your living
cells to construct your fingernail, or your eyelash. Scientists
reported that if those codes were packed into 500 page books, those
books will fill the 450 kilometer long Grand Canyon fifty times over!
Over millions of years of evolution and a lifetime of experiences,
your system has acquired an immense cache of knowledge. The system
also provides such massive
stores of inherited wisdomto
the nerve cells, which manage your emotions.

What
Causes Emotions? -They Record And Recall MemoriesEmotional
impulses trigger myriad finely controlled patterns of behavior. They
access from memories the exact knowledge needed for survival. An
animal lurking in the bush carries the memories of its encounters
over a lifetime. If it feels uneasy, the system extracts memories of
the sensory indications of danger. If it is fearful, it gathers
memories of escape routes from the battle zone. Its anger extracts
memories of muscular responses to battle. By controlling system
access to a focused set of memories, emotions restrict your vision
and control your response. When you are angry, you will feel
convinced that you have every right to be angry. Fully justifying
itself, the system blinds you to any other viewpoint.

What
Causes Emotions? -Lower Levels of ConsciousnessThe
mammalian organs in the limbic system generate partisan emotions.
They carry you into troubling levels
of consciousnesswith
blinkered views. Which one of these levels represents the real
you?

The
Buddhists have experienced this perspective. “You will not see
something is good or bad, whether it is a beautiful picture or a very
ugly picture, a sweet sound or an ugly sound. When you act like this,
your mind will stay calm.”

What
Causes Emotions? -Noble Urges TooWith
the calm freedom of RI in charge, searing emotions cannot hijack your
system. Free of troubling competition, you can benefit from special
purpose circuits, which generate pleasure from a flawless line, the
fragrance of a flower, or from harmony in music. When you are calm,
nature adds to your delight by not inhibiting the innate surges of
neural impulses to your pleasure regions, which enable you to cherish
a work of art, or enjoy a lilting song.

What
Causes Emotions? -Practice Of Positive EmotionsThe
Buddhists added value to their lives by cultivating noble emotions.
They practiced the experience of compassion for nature by imagining
the feelings of a bird, or an animal. Great actors invoke a range of
emotions on stage. If you glare at a person, your words will sound
hostile. Try it. You can learn to cultivate positive emotions.
Amazingly, if you look at an opponent with compassion, his faults
will suddenly appear to be pathetic failings.

What
Causes Emotions? -Nature's Masterpieces TooNature
has coded
sophisticated emotional behaviorsinto
your neural network. The incredibly specific behavioral outcome of
each emotion is recorded in our culture and literature. Love
transforms your behavior as it seeks to cherish and protect. Love is
patient and kind. Love suppresses the emotions of anger,
irritability, jealousy and rudeness. Your needs are subdued to give
way to an awareness of the needs of your loved one. Love forgets and
forgives past wrongs. Love persists in spite of problems, keeping
faith in the loved one. Love does not gloat over injustice and is
happy in the victory of truth. Nature's pattern recognition processes
have crafted an incredibly high standard of behavior within the codes
of a single emotion, to impel the best in mankind.

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